Anthony Wing Kosner
, ContributorQuantum of Content and innovations in user experienceOpinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Gregg Gillis, the obsessive brain and tireless body behind the electronic mashup project called Girl Talk, is, perhaps, the hardest-working man in show business. That his music is almost wholly composed of samples of the work of other pop musicians—including the original hardest-working man, Mr. James Brown—is part of what makes his work so relevant to the over-shared and under-curated electronic world we experience online.

During the past decade, Gillis has built a highly orignal body of work—five albums and more than a thousand live performances—that meticulously matches rock, pop and hip hop beats with verses and hooks from Jay-Z, Lady Gaga, Radiohead, Adele and other radio favorites. But he didn't start out quite so infectious and accessible. Gillis' early music was experimental and difficult noise rock and "glitch," and his audience neither danced nor showed up in great numbers.

But there were, for Gillis, some mitigating factors that eventually led him to his current formulation of artistic rigor with good-time danceability. The first is that he grew up on hip hop first, before he got into more avant garde territory. The second was that even his early "bratty" exploits in noise enjoyed the overlay of pop elements, like Paula Abdul. And the third is that his training in college was not as an artiste but as a scientist.

From hip hop, Gillis got the intuitive notion that music could be made out of other music, and that manipulation of samples was a way of creating flow, just like a rapper's rhymes. But it is the geeky scientist in him that has led to the intensive and constant experimentation through which he builds his record and rebuilds his live shows each night. Through sampling and experimentation, Girl Talk is able to achieve a compression of cultural time that makes the music a living distillation of pop. It took him several years of trial and error with the Girl Talk project before he hit upon the intersection of his geeky interest in pop and music that was actually considered pop. The breakthrough happened with 2006's album, Night Ripper, and it has been a wild ride for Gillis ever since.

When you listen to the recorded version of Girl Talk's music, it’s hard not to get involved with the “Name That Tune” game of it. Initially, it bothered me that nothing repeated. Unlike traditional song structure that is based on repeating things and not quite repeating things and suspending the repetition of things, Girl Talk compositions are rivers that move on. But when I saw the show live, as I did this summer at the State Theatre in Portland, Maine, it all totally made sense. I didn't yearn for repetition of a hook, because the next hook was just as great. And I didn't worry about identifying what I was hearing, it was just a big, fun and incredibly sweaty mosh pit of an experience, and I could tell that the entire audience felt the same way. For a taste of the live experience, have a look at this video from Gillis' hometown, Pittsburgh, from earlier in the summer.

You might think that someone who uses other people's music so freely would disdain any notion of copyright, but Gillis, in fact, has a very balanced and contemporary viewpoint. "I basically believe in that idea [of Fair Use], that if you create something out of pre-existing media, that’s transformative, that’s not negatively impacting the potential sales of the artist you’re sampling, if it’s not hurting them in some way, then you should be allowed to make your art and put it out there. I think, even in the years of doing this, the conversation has shifted a good bit." Gillis has found himself a mashup artist in a mashup culture, and he no longer has to explain what he's doing or defend it. It is telling that no artist that has been sampled by Girl Talk has ever complained. Frankly, it's a little bit like having a guitar solo on a Steely Dan record used to be. It's a real compliment to be included.

The way Girl Talk puts stuff together reminds me of the way that I think people would like to experience pop culture on a daily basis. We watch television, and surf the web, picking things we like, but we don’t have the ability to put it together for ourselves in interesting ways. We spend most of our time trying to find the interesting bits. Girl Talk to me is an ideal of content curation. Not only is it all music you like, or music you didn’t know you liked, but it’s put together in a way that is engaging itself. Gillis came to this intuitively, "it definitely wasn’t like, 'I need to put all this music together, and it’s going to reflect the way people digest the digital world.' It’s never like I had this great vision of the future," he says. But, in fact, that is what he has done.

Gillis is taking most of next year off from his punishing (but exhilarating) performance schedule, to focus on some new music that is less tied to the Girl Talk live show. Like Gotye, who I also interviewed recently, he is an artist following his ideas where they lead. Commercial success is helpful in some way, but kind of accidental. And also, like Gotye, and many innovators in electronic music these day, he is writing his own code, developing his own methods, being his own most critical audience.

To get a fuller immersion in how Gillis makes his music and what he's thinking about, read my extensive interview with him. And all six Girl Talk albums are available from Illegal Art for free or pay what you want. But for the real experience, Girl Talk still has some live shows scheduled out west this fall culminating in the SS Coachella cruise in mid-December after which he will go on hiatus for most of 2013.